Iranian strike hits AWS Data Center in Bahrain, sparking fires and regional cloud outages

Amazon’s cloud computing division, Amazon Web Services (AWS), has suffered a direct hit to its infrastructure in Bahrain following an Iranian missile and drone strike. The attack, which occurred on April 1, 2026, targeted the Batelco headquarters in the Hamala district, a critical facility that houses AWS "ME-SOUTH-1" region infrastructure and Direct Connect nodes.

The Bahraini Ministry of Interior confirmed that civil defense teams were deployed to extinguish a large fire at the facility resulting from "Iranian aggression." The government did not initially name Amazon, but internal memos and service health dashboards have since confirmed that the strike has caused "extended unavailability" for multiple cloud services across the region.

A targeted campaign against "digital sovereignty"

The strike is the latest in an intensifying campaign by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) against U.S. technology giants. On March 31, just 24 hours before the attack, the IRGC officially labeled 18 American tech companies, including Google, Microsoft, Meta, and Apple, as "legitimate military targets," accusing them of acting as digital "spies" for U.S. and Israeli intelligence operations.

Amazon was notably absent from that specific list, but it has borne the brunt of the physical fallout.

This marks the third major disruption to AWS facilities in the Middle East since March:

• March 1: Two AWS availability zones in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and one in Bahrain were hit by Shahed drones.

• March 24: A separate "localized power failure" in the UAE was attributed to an object strike.

• April 1: The most recent strike in Hamala caused a fire and significant hardware damage.

• "Hard down": The scale of disruption

According to an internal Amazon memo, the Dubai and Bahrain AWS centers are considered "impaired" and are expected to remain offline or at reduced capacity for an "extended period."

The impact has been felt immediately across the Middle East and Africa’s digital economies:

• Banking: Major institutions, including Emirates NBD and Abu Dhabi Commercial Bank, reported platform outages.

• Fintech: Pakistan’s SadaPay went completely offline as its entire backbone relied on the Bahrain region.

• Logistics: The popular "everything app" Careem experienced widespread service failures during the peak Ramadan period.

"These regions continue to be impaired, and services should not expect to be operating with normal levels of redundancy," the internal memo read. "We do not have a timeline for when operations will return to normal."

The "meteor strike" scenario

Cloud architects have long designed systems under the assumption that it would take a "meteor strike" to knock out an entire AWS region, which typically consists of three physically separate Availability Zones (AZs). However, the conflict in the Gulf has proven that coordinated drone and missile strikes can bypass these redundancies by targeting multiple AZs simultaneously within a geographic conflict zone.

In an unprecedented move, AWS has reportedly waived all usage charges for its Middle East region for the month of March to compensate customers for the extreme instability.

Regional migration and recovery

Amazon is currently advising all customers with critical workloads in the Middle East to migrate to alternate regions, such as Europe (Frankfurt) or the US (N. Virginia). However, for many regional companies, this move is complicated by strict data residency laws that require sensitive financial and citizen data to remain within national borders.

The recovery effort is ongoing, but with the IRGC threatening further "destruction of relevant units" in exchange for any future military actions by the U.S. or Israel, the security of the world’s cloud backbone in the Middle East remains at its most vulnerable point in history.